ECE News Story

ECE Faculty Awarded MURI Grants

ECE Faculty Awarded MURI Grants

The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded multi-million dollar grants to two University of Maryland research teams consisting of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) faculty through the Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program.

The first team's proposal, titled "Designing Reliable and Secure Tactical MANETs," was selected for an estimated $6.25 million in MURI funding over five years. The team included Principal Investigator (PI) and ECE Professor Virgil Gligor, John Baras (ECE/ISR/HyNet), and Jonathan Katz (CS/ECE/UMIACS) from Maryland, along with Professor Adrian Perrig of Carnegie Mellon University, Professor Nitin Vaidya of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and Radha Poovendran a 1999 ECE Ph.D. alumnus and Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The MURI program supports multi-disciplinary research in areas of DoD relevance related to science and engineering. A MURI effort usually involves a team of researchers with expertise in a variety of disciplines in order to help accelerate research progress and convert research results to application.

Competition for the 2007 MURI awards was very intense. The Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) received a total of 129 proposals, and only 36 were selected for funding, based on a merit review by panels of experts in the science and engineering fields. A complete list of projects selected for fiscal 2007 funding can be viewed at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/MAR2007/d20070307muri.pdf.